by Jill Jones
She put her finger against his lips, as she had once before, when they had first kissed in front of the fire at the crofter’s lodge. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” she whispered with a smile, and this time, her words held no trace of anger and bitterness. “I mean it, Duncan. I understand that you had to make that trip, and I respect you for going. It’s because you’re that kind of man that I…”
Duncan’s heart leapt, and he held his breath in hopeful anticipation. “You what?”
Her eyes searched his for a moment, and he saw her swallow. “I…love you.” Duncan closed his eyes and kissed her forehead.
“You don’t know how I have longed to hear that from you,” he whispered. “Because I have loved you since the beginning of this crazy ordeal.”
Their lips met again in the tentative, gentle kiss of friends turned lovers, but it quickly became a hungry, passionate declaration of the love that had gone for so long unspoken. At last she drew away, breathless.
“Duncan, what’s to become of us? Can we ever get out of here? I mean really out, back to our own time?”
Tossing away the rag of a cap she wore, Duncan entwined his fingers in the golden richness of her hair, wishing he had a more positive answer for her. “I’m not certain about getting back to our own time. We can try. But I promise you, if you want to leave the Grainger’s house, I’ll confiscate Mr. Young’s boat for good. It is sound and will take us to someplace that is safer than the here and now.”
“What about Pauley? At one time, you said you didn’t think it was a good idea to take him back into the 21st century, but Duncan, if we try to go home, I can’t leave him here.”
“Neither can I.” He saw the relief on her face and knew how much the boy had come to mean to her.
Then she gave him a doleful look. “And I can’t go anywhere until I’ve helped rescue the Honours of Scotland.”
In his fervor to be with Taylor again, Duncan had almost forgotten about the plan Governor Ogilvy had asked him to help with today. The plan in which Taylor played a crucial role. Was this the reason she’d been forced back in time? he thought suddenly. Was she assigned the duty of smuggling the crown, sword and scepter out from beneath Cromwell’s very nose? Was she the peasant woman collecting dulse he’d read about in history who hid the regalia beneath the seaweed and walked the ten miles to Kinneff Kirk with her heavy load?
The concept boggled his mind. But if not Taylor, then who?
If not now, then when?
As if on cue, tiny pebbles rained down from above. “What the heck?” Taylor craned her neck and saw far above her the tiny speck of a figure attempting to get their attention. “There’s the kerchief,” she said, pointing to a red dot waving on a rope high above them. “It’s time.”
Dunbar Castle
27 April 1567
There are times when we wish we had never left France. Being the queen dowager and under the control of Catherine de Medici, a fate we once abhorred, surely would have been more desirable than that which we have suffered of late. Our despair envelopes us like a fog, and we are unable to think clearly. We no longer have the will to fight back, or to make sensible decisions, and we despise our weakness.
We have succumbed to Bothwell’s scheme to take control of Scotland. We had privately negotiated for an agreement between us, that we would marry him in return for his absolute loyalty and protection in these times of terror and uncertainty. We had agreed that upon leaving Stirling and our visit to our son James, he would meet us at the Bridges, appearing to protect us from some harm that lay in store in Edinburgh. We believed in his loyalty and entrusted our person to him, allowing him to take the bridle of our horse and lead us away to Dunbar. Once the castle doors were shut behind us here, however, we have suffered the most degrading and reprehensible treatment, a betrayal by this once trusted ally so cruel, it has near taken away our mind. We accompanied Bothwell with no protest, as we agreed, and we had also agreed to marry him. But this was not enough. That first night, he came into our chambers and ravished our person and lay with us against our will. Although he spoke with words and answers gentle, still his doings were rude and uncalled for. He has forced us into a hasty marriage, in which there is no joy, indeed much fear and despair instead. We spend our days a prisoner of Bothwell, awaiting our return to Edinburgh with a melancholy we cannot shake. We wish that we were dead.
Robert Gordon laid the small book gently back onto the table and wiped his face with a large handkerchief. This was a story not found in most history books. Bothwell had raped the Queen. Gordon found himself surprisingly shocked and outraged, touched by her account that revealed her depression, humiliation and fury. He’d never thought of Queen Mary, indeed of any royal person in history, as being like everyone else, human and vulnerable. But after his intense hours of translating Mary’s diary entries, he felt as if he knew this woman intimately.
The Casket Letters had been shown to have been altered, their revised content used to condemn Mary to death for being a conspirator in her husband’s murder. When the diary was made public, it would clearly prove otherwise.
As would the charge that she had wantonly run away with Lord Bothwell, a known accomplice in the king’s death.
Gordon suspected the authenticity of the diary to be immediately challenged. After all, this was a major change in the modern view of history. Would he, as Taylor Kincaid’s lawyer, be called upon to defend it in court?
Initially, the idea intrigued him. At last, his day in the sun. He would be in all the newspapers. On television. But what if he lost? What if he couldn’t count on John Doggett’s appraisal? Hell, he thought, I’m defeating myself before I’ve even begun. As always.
Robert Gordon sat down heavily in the chair and picked up the diary again, thinking that he never should have become a lawyer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Electric excitement coursed through Taylor as she leaned back into Duncan’s arms and together they watched the drama begin. From on high, a bundle began its slow descent, bumping against the rock walls, snagging every so often until the dispatchers managed to free it and move it along its way.
“Can you believe this is happening?” she breathed, wishing for all her life that Barry and Rob and her camera equipment were here. Camera. Oh, dear, she thought. She’d brought the camera, as she had every day since she’d begun her hikes to Dunnottar, but with Duncan here, she was hesitant to use it, knowing he did not want to risk exposure of such high-tech sorcery. But that sorcery had saved her life. Besides, no one was there to witness her photography except the two of them, and she’d never have another chance to record this remarkable episode in history in which they somehow were playing a vital part. She wriggled away from him and reached beneath her skirts.
“Something I can help with?” Duncan remarked with a wicked grin.
“Later,” she promised with an equally provocative smile. Achieving her goal, she brought out her camera, amazed that the battery appeared still charged. “Right now, I have a job to do.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, seeing what she was about to do. “Don’t you ever give up? Have you had that thing with you all along? Don’t you realize what danger that could have put you in? Still could?”
“Don’t you realize you ask too many questions?” she shot back, aiming the camera at the descending bundle. “Here it comes!” She snapped off some burst shots that caught the descent as the Honours were lowered and felt a surge of the gratification she used to enjoy from her job, capturing an exciting story on film. Except this was a real life story unlike anything anyone else would ever photograph. “This is going to be great!” she exclaimed.
But when she turned to Duncan, his expression was both angry and exasperated.
“What’s the matter?” she demanded. “We’re safe enough down here. There’s no one around to see this…”
“What are you planning to do with those pictures?” he asked.
Taylor looked
at him as if he were nuts. “What do you think? I’m a television producer. This is the story of a lifetime. Several lifetimes maybe. If I can just bring back proof…”
But she broke off as Duncan placed his hands on her shoulders. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Her cheeks grew warm. She’d forgotten the God-complex side of this man. “Who are you to say what I can and cannot do? It’s my camera. My career.”
“This is not some damned travelogue, Taylor,” he growled. “What if you produce a show, and some of your ‘lunatic’ fans decide to follow in your footsteps? What do you think might happen?”
Taylor sniffed. She started to lash out at his high and mighty attitude, but his questions unsettled her. What indeed would happen if some viewer, or lots of them even, descended upon Stonehaven, hired the likes of Fergus McGehee to take them to the Ladysgate and took this little vacation back into time? How many would perish on the rocks before they got here? How many would burn as witches after they arrived?
Her shoulders slumped, and she was decidedly put out with Duncan for bursting her balloon. “I suppose you’re right,” she admitted, “but I’d still like to photograph this rescue, if for no other purpose than to put the pictures into my personal scrapbook. Maybe under ‘Adventures I Have Survived.’”
Duncan gave her an understanding squeeze. “I know it’s hard.”
The bundle reached them, falling with a metallic clunk onto the rocks. Together, they carefully untied the rough cloth that had been formed into something resembling a gunny-sack, exposing to the light of the hazy spring day the crown and the scepter, ancient relics of the kingdom of Scotland.
“Holy man,” Taylor murmured, awestruck at the sight. “I’m supposed to put that crown under the seaweed?” The purple velvet of the bonnet had faded, but still, it was royal fabric, not something one slings lightly into a creel full of slimy dulse.
“Well, I don’t think they mean for you to wear it out of here,” Duncan replied wryly. But it was with equal awe that he removed the crown and the scepter from the bag. He pulled on the rope to signal the governor to raise it again to the castle, where he would attach its next delivery, the sword of state. Then he looked at Taylor, relenting of his objections. “Go ahead,” he conceded, holding up the two pieces of the regalia. “I’ll say cheese.”
Duncan had made his point, and even though she didn’t like it, he doubted if she would follow through with her plans for producing a television show featuring their little adventure back in time. If she made it back to a time that had television. So he posed for her camera.
But even as he did, he was struck by the differences in their lives. She was an American woman committed to a glamorous career. He was just a lonely Scotsman living in a house filled with tormented memories. And Pauley…a deaf, mute orphan from the seventeenth century. Could they make some kind of sense of it all, when, and if, they returned to their own time?
For the first time since he’d vowed to himself they would always be together, Duncan suffered doubts.
“Get the creel,” he said when she had taken the photos she wanted. He nodded to the basket, which in all was over three feet in length and a foot wide. Taylor brought it to him, and together they knelt on the rocks and arranged the regalia as best they could beneath the smelly seaweed.
“Where’s a Ziploc when you need one?” Taylor remarked, making a face when Duncan loaded a handful of the dulse over the crown.
“In the big picture, it won’t make a bit of difference that this velvet gets ruined,” he replied with a grin. “I saw this crown once when I took the boys to Edinburgh Castle. It got a bright new red bonnet only a few years back, and…” He caught himself in mid-sentence, startled at what had just happened. He had spoken about his sons, easily and without a shred of the grief that formerly had accompanied his memories of them. He had felt happy when he’d recalled their trip together, rather than filled with the ashen gray despair that before had always tightened his gut.
“What’s wrong?” Taylor glanced up at his sudden silence.
He looked at her for a long moment, then drew her into his arms, and an indescribable sense of peace settled over him. They would make it work. They had to. Because their love had made it possible for him to live again. Taking a strand of her now very long hair between his fingers, he tucked it behind her ear. “Nothing,” he said, bending to kiss her tenderly. “Nothing at all…”
Their embrace was interrupted suddenly by a clanking sound, and they looked up to see the bag coming down again like a lumpy dumbwaiter. “Let’s get this over with.” Duncan stole one more kiss before the parcel reached them. “I’m ready to get on with life.”
Taylor took his hands in hers, her touch sending an electric jolt up his spine. “Me, too,” she replied emphatically. “The way I figure, we have a lot of good years ahead of us. Over three hundred and fifty by my reckoning.”
The sword presented more difficulty in hiding than had the other two pieces of the regalia, for it was over a yard in length and enclosed in a stiff scabbard that was even longer. “This will barely fit in the basket,” he said, turning it in various positions to try to make it fit. “No one would probably notice from a distance, but if you should be stopped, it wouldn’t take much to discover that you are carrying more than seaweed.” Then he remembered something from his schoolboy history lessons. “I have to bend it.”
“What?” He could see that Taylor was mortified at the thought. “You can’t bend the Scottish sword of state.”
“Watch me.”
“Duncan! No!”
He turned and kissed her lightly. “Dinna worry, my good lass,” he said, reverting to the Scots dialect. “‘Tis part of history. Ye shall see when we visit th’ sword again, long in th’ future.” He saw Taylor shake her head in resignation but wasn’t surprised when she took his picture as he bent the sword and scabbard in two places, allowing it to nestle perfectly along the bottom of the creel.
The time had come both had dreaded, when Taylor must leave him and make her final trek southward to Kinneff Kirk, where these treasures would lie, safe from the desecration of the pillaging English until the monarchy of Britain was restored. “Why don’t you let me do this for you?” he said, despising the danger Taylor would be in until she reached Kinneff. But he realized immediately the impossibility of taking her place. The soldiers were used to a peasant woman, and even if he were to don her dress, he would never pass for a female.
“I’ll be fine,” Taylor assured him, replacing the camera in its bag beneath her skirts.
“I wish you’d stop that,” Duncan tried to keep his voice light.
“What?”
“Raising your skirts like that. You can’t imagine what it does to me.”
Taylor didn’t lower her skirt after she had zipped the bag, but rather leaned back against the rock wall of the cliff and with a saucy grin, struck a chorus girl pose. “Why don’t you show me?”
“Cut that out!” Duncan looked at her, wanting with all his heart to take her up on her invitation, but time was critical to her safety. “You must leave. Now! You’ve already lingered longer than the soldiers are accustomed to you being here.”
The humor left her expression and her shoulders sagged. “I suppose you’re right.” Then she brightened again. “Raincheck?”
The final entry in the diary was scrawled across the pages in a shaky, unstable hand, as if it had been written in great haste. Robert Gordon knew enough of history to guess what the translation might reveal, and his heart was heavy as he began:
Holyrood Palace
16 June 1567
We take great risk in writing this, for we expect at any moment our gaolers will appear. We hold out hope that the Hamiltons will rally to us, but our future looks bleak, as Lord Bothwell has fled to Dunbar, and we have become the prisoner of our lords, to whom we surrendered in good faith and who have now treated us so grievously. What have we done to deserve this end? We sought nothing more than
to rule Scotland in peace and decency. Yet through our misplaced trust in Moray, loathesome brother, and Maitland, who will not raise his eyes to us, and the rest, we have fallen prey to the avarice and greed we saw in their eyes the day they knelt and declared their fealty to us. They were liars then, and they remain liars to this day.
Mark this, that when we are free again, and we will not let ourself believe it could be otherwise, we will hang and quarter every one of these treasonous savages. Our Holy Father forgive us.
We turn this book into the safekeeping of Mary Seton, our beloved, loyal Marie, for it is the only record that we have with which to defend our thoughts and actions when so many lies have been spread about us, our letters having been stolen, along with their silver casket. Mary S. also has the Scottish Rose and our letter expressing our wishes for it to be joined to the Honours. It must survive, even if we do not. The Scottish Rose is our hope, our prayer for Scotland. It must not perish, but must fulfill the destiny for which we have suffered so much—Peace in Scotland, and unity. An end to the hatred and deceit, even if it means the death of those who continue to perpetrate these abominations amongst us. We shall rise again. We shall be strong again. We shall reign v—
The ink smeared at this point, almost wiping to the edge of the page, and in his mind’s eye, Gordon saw a terrified young queen hastily drop her pen and hand off the book to her trusted Mary Seton before her “gaolers” took her away to be imprisoned in the gloomy castle on an island in the middle of Lochleven. The Mary who had just written these words obviously believed she would be freed and would reign again as Queen of Scots. But Gordon knew it was not to be. She would never see Mary Seton again. Or wear the crown. Or hold the sword or scepter. She would be free again, but only for a short time, after her escape from Lochleven, when she made her final fatal error in judgment and trusted her future, indeed her life, to her jealous cousin, Elizabeth.
